Lecturer in Finance

Contact Details

• Tel: 0116 252 2880
• Email: dl110@le.ac.uk
• Office: AC213
• Office Hours:

Biography

Personal Page

Research Interests

• Market microstructure
• Financial regulation
• Computational, agent-based and evolutionary approaches

Supervision Interests

Understanding the rules governing financial markets. Understanding how financial market behaviour is effected by regulation is vital in ensuring financial stability and investigating trading behaviour. At the lowest level of operation different financial markets around the world operate in widely differing manners. Whilst all financial markets match buyers and sellers, market specific rules and regulations govern the manner in which this is done. The purpose of these rules is to ensure orderly market conditions, however, due to their complexity and specificity to individual markets each rules affect if difficult to determine. Simulation is a natural tool to examine this issue, allowing the modeller to deal with situations difficult to capture analytically and for which there is limited empirical data. A good student will employ this tool to develop sophisticated models to comment on financial market design and regulation.

Trader behaviour in financial markets. Understanding the behaviour of traders in financial markets is one of the key goals of finance research. In recent years there has been growing attention to the area of microstructure, examining how and why traders submit individual orders to buy and sell assets at a particular time. There is much work still to be done in this area, considering factors such as portfolio choice, information availability and non-rational trading behaviours. This area offers a good student excellent opportunities to use analytical, computational or empirical techniques to investigate these issues and produce significant findings.

The design and analysis of financial regulation within the economy. The massive upheaval in recent years has highlighted issues in our understanding of financial regulation. The economy consists of many types of financial institutions interacting in a variety of manners through markets and alternative channels. Understanding the effect of regulation and how it will propagate through the economy is therefore a challenging. Of particular concern is how these regulations affect the frequency and severity of crashes and how they should be best employed to maximise the benefit to the economy. A good student will construct a model, informed by the available data and evidence from the recent financial turmoil to comment on the effectiveness of financial regulations.

PhD Supervision

• Piotr Jelonek
• Hossein Sedghi Khorasgani 

Teaching

• EC7076: Financial Derivatives
• EC7097: Financial Risk Management 

Administrative Responsibilities

• Departmental Computer Officer
• CFA coordinator
• MSc. Financial Economics Program Coordinator 

Most Recent Publications

• Ladley, D. & Schenk-Hoppé, K. R., 2009. "Do stylised facts of order book markets need strategic behaviour?," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 33(4), 817-831
• Ladley, D., 2008. "Zero-intelligence in Economics and Finance" Knowledge Engineering Review: Special issue on Agent Based Computational Economics, Forthcoming
• Ladley, D. & Bullock, S., 2008. "The Strategic Exploitation of Limited Information and Opportunity in Networked Markets," Computational Economics, 32(3), 295-315

Full listing of publications